II

"Starting from these basic principles, the German workers' party
strives by all legal means for the free state—and—socialist society:
that abolition of the wage system together with the iron law of wages --
and—exploitation in every form; the elimination of all social and political
inequality."

I shall return to the "free" state later.

So, in future, the German Workers' party has got to believe in
Lassalle's "iron law of wages"! That this may not be lost, the nonsense
is perpetrated of speaking of the "abolition of the wage system" (it should
read: system of wage labor), "together with the iron law of wages". If
I abolish wage labor, then naturally I abolish its laws also, whether they
are of "iron" or sponge. But Lassalle's attack on wage labor turns almost
solely on this so-called law. In order, therefore, to prove that Lassalle's
sect has conquered, the "wage system" must be abolished "together with
the iron law of wages" and not without it.

It is well known that nothing of the "iron law of wages" is Lassalle's
except the word "iron" borrowed from Goethe's "great, eternal iron laws". [1]
The word "iron" is a label by which the true believers recognize one another.
But if I take the law with Lassalle's stamp on it, and consequently in
his sense, then I must also take it with his substantiation for it. And
what is that? As Lange already showed, shortly after Lassalle's death,
it is the Malthusian theory of population (preached by Lange himself).
But if this theory is correct, then again I cannot abolish the law even
if I abolish wage labor a hundred times over, because the law then governs
not only the system of wage labor but every social system. Basing
themselves directly on this, the economists have been proving for 50 years
and more that socialism cannot abolish poverty, which has its basis in
nature, but can only make it general, distribute it simultaneously
over the whole surface of society!

But all this is not the main thing. Quite apart from the false
Lassallean formulation of the law, the truly outrageous retrogression consists
in the following:

Since Lassalle's death, there has asserted itself in our party
the scientific understanding that wages are not what they appear to be
-- namely, the value, or price, of labor—but only
a masked form for the value, or price, of labor power.
Thereby, the whole bourgeois conception of wages hitherto, as well as all
the criticism hitherto directed against this conception, was thrown overboard
once and for all. It was made clear that the wage worker has permission
to work for his own subsistence—that is, to live, only insofar
as he works for a certain time gratis for the capitalist (and hence also
for the latter's co-consumers of surplus value); that the whole capitalist
system of production turns on the increase of this gratis labor by extending
the working day, or by developing the productivity—that is, increasing
the intensity or labor power, etc.; that, consequently, the system of wage
labor is a system of slavery, and indeed of a slavery which becomes more
severe in proportion as the social productive forces of labor develop,
whether the worker receives better or worse payment. And after this understanding
has gained more and more ground in our party, some return to Lassalle's
dogma although they must have known that Lassalle did not know what
wages were, but, following in the wake of the bourgeois economists, took
the appearance for the essence of the matter.

It is as if, among slaves who have at last got behind the secret
of slavery and broken out in rebellion, a slave still in thrall to obsolete
notions were to inscribe on the program of the rebellion: Slavery must
be abolished because the feeding of slaves in the system of slavery cannot
exceed a certain low maximum!

Does not the mere fact that the representatives of our party were
capable of perpetrating such a monstrous attack on the understanding that
has spread among the mass of our party prove, by itself, with what criminal
levity and with what lack of conscience they set to work in drawing up
this compromise program!

Instead of the indefinite concluding phrase of the paragraph,
"the elimination of all social and political inequality", it ought to have
been said that with the abolition of class distinctions all social and
political inequality arising from them would disappear of itself.